ENCLOSURE (1)
An enclosure, like most Parliamentary operations, began with a petition
from a local person or persons, setting forth the inconveniencies of
the present system and the advantages of such a measure. Parliament,
having received the petition, would give leave for a Bill to be
introduced. The Bill would be read a first and a second time, and
would then be referred to a Committee, which, after considering such
petitions against the enclosure as the House of Commons referred to it,
would present its report. The Bill would then be passed, sent to the
Lords, and receive the Royal Assent. Finally, the Commissioners named
in the Bill would descend on the district and distribute the land. That
is, in brief, the history of a successful enclosure agitation. We will
now proceed to explore its different stages in detail.
The original petition was often the act of a big landowner, whose
solitary signature was enough to set an enclosure process in train.[33]
Before 1774 it was not even incumbent on this single individual to
let his neighbours know that he was asking Parliament for leave to
redistribute their property. In that year the House of Commons made
a Standing Order providing that notice of any such petition should
be affixed to the church door in each of the parishes affected, for
three Sundays in the month of August or the month of September. This
provision was laid down, as we learn from the Report of the Committee
that considered the Standing Orders in 1775, because it had often
happened that those whose land was to be enclosed knew nothing whatever
of transactions in which they were rather intimately concerned, until
they were virtually completed.[34]
But the publicity that was secured by this Standing Order, though it
prevented the process of enclosure from being completed in the dark,
did not in practice give the village any kind of voice in its own
destiny. The promoters laid all their plans before they took their
neighbours into the secret. When their arrangements were mature, they
gave notice to the parish in accordance with the requirements of the
Standing Order, or they first took their petition to the various
proprietors for signature, or in some cases they called a public
meeting. The facts set out in the petition against the Enclosure Bill
for Haute Huntre, show that the promoters did not think that they were
bound to accept the opinion of a meeting. In that case ‘the great
majority’ were hostile, but the promoters proceeded with their petition
notwithstanding.[35] Whatever the precise method, unless some large
proprietor stood out against the scheme, the promoters were masters of
the situation. This we know from the evidence of witnesses favourable
to enclosure. ‘The proprietors of large estates,’ said Arthur Young,
‘generally agree upon the measure, adjust the principal points among
themselves, and fix upon their attorney before they appoint any general
meeting of the proprietors.’[36] Addington, in his _Inquiry into the
Reasons for and against Inclosing_, quoting another writer, says, ‘the
whole plan is generally settled between the solicitor and two or three
principal proprietors without ever letting the rest of them into the
secret till they are called upon to sign the petition.’[37] What stand
could the small proprietor hope to make against such forces? The matter
was a _chose jugée_, and his assent a mere formality. If he tried to
resist, he could be warned that the success of the enclosure petition
was certain, and that those who obstructed it would suffer, as those
who assisted it would gain, in the final award. His only prospect of
successful opposition to the lord of the manor, the magistrate, the
impropriator of the tithes, the powers that enveloped his life, the
powers that appointed the commissioner who was to make the ultimate
award, lay in his ability to move a dim and distant Parliament of
great landlords to come to his rescue. It needs no very penetrating
imagination to picture what would have happened in a village in which a
landowner of the type of Richardson’s hero in _Pamela_ was bent on an
enclosure, and the inhabitants, being men like Goodman Andrews, knew
that enclosure meant their ruin. What, in point of fact, could the poor
do to declare their opposition? They could tear down the notices from
the church doors:[38] they could break up a public meeting, if one
were held: but the only way in which they could protest was by violent
and disorderly proceedings, which made no impression at all upon
Parliament, and which the forces of law and order could, if necessary,
be summoned to quell.
The scene now shifts to Parliament, the High Court of Justice, the
stronghold of the liberties of Englishmen. Parliament hears the
petition, and, almost as a matter of course, grants it, giving leave
for the introduction of a Bill, and instructing the member who
presents the petition to prepare it. This is not a very long business,
for the promoters have generally taken the trouble to prepare their
Bill in advance. The Bill is submitted, read a first and second
time, and then referred to a Committee. Now a modern Parliamentary
Private Bill Committee is regarded as a tribunal whose integrity and
impartiality are beyond question, and justly, for the most elaborate
precautions are taken to secure that it shall deserve this character.
The eighteenth-century Parliament treated its Committee with just as
much respect, but took no precautions at all to obtain a disinterested
court. Indeed, the committee that considered an enclosure was chosen
on the very contrary principle. This we know, not from the evidence of
unkind and prejudiced outsiders, but from the Report of the Committee
of the House of Commons, which inquired in 1825 into the constitution
of Committees on Private Bills. ‘Under the present system each Bill
is committed to the Member who is charged with its management and
such other Members as he may choose to name in the House, and the
Members serving for a particular County (usually the County immediately
connected with the object of the Bill) _and the adjoining Counties_,
and consequently it has been practically found that the Members to whom
Bills have been committed have been generally those who have been most
interested in the result.’
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there developed the
practice of opening the committees. This was the system of applying to
Private Bills the procedure followed in the case of Public Bills, and
proposing a resolution in the House of Commons that ‘all who attend
shall have voices,’ _i.e._ that any member of the House who cared
to attend the committee should be able to vote. We can see how this
arrangement acted. It might happen that some of the county members were
hostile to a particular enclosure scheme; in that case the promoters
could call for an open committee and mass their friends upon it. It
might happen, on the other hand, that the committee was solid in
supporting an enclosure, and that some powerful person in the House
considered that his interests, or the interests of his friend, had
not been duly consulted in the division of the spoil. In such a case
he would call for all to ‘have voices’ and so compel the promoters to
satisfy his claims. This system then secured some sort of rough justice
as between the powerful interests represented in Parliament, but it
left the small proprietors and the cottagers, who were unrepresented in
this mêlée, absolutely at the mercy of these conflicting forces.
It is difficult, for example, to imagine that a committee in which
the small men were represented would have sanctioned the amazing
clause in the Ashelworth Act[39] which provided ‘that all fields or
inclosures containing the Property of Two or more Persons within one
fence, and also all inclosures containing the property of one Person
only, if the same be held by or under different Tenures or Interests,
shall be considered as commonable land and be divided and allotted
accordingly.’ This clause, taken with the clause that follows, simply
meant that some big landowner had his eye on some particular piece of
enclosed property, which in the ordinary way would not have gone into
the melting-pot at all. The arrangements of the Wakefield Act would
hardly have survived the scrutiny of a committee on which the Duke of
Leeds’ class was not paramount. Under that Act[40] the duke was to have
full power to work mines and get minerals, and those proprietors whose
premises suffered in consequence were to have reasonable satisfaction,
not from the duke who was enriched by the disturbing cause, but
from all the allottees, including presumably those whose property
was damaged. Further, to save himself inconvenience, the duke could
forbid allottees on Westgate Moor to build a house for sixty years. A
different kind of House of Commons would have looked closely at the Act
at Moreton Corbet which gave the lord of the manor all enclosures and
encroachments more than twenty years old, and also at the not uncommon
provision which exempted the tithe-owner from paying for his own
fencing.
The Report of the 1825 Committee describes the system as ‘inviting all
the interested parties in the House to take part in the business of
the committee, which necessarily terminates in the prevalence of the
strongest part, for they who have no interest of their own to serve
will not be prevailed upon to take part in a struggle in which their
unbiassed judgment can have no effect.’ The chairman of the committee
was generally the member who had moved to introduce the Bill. The
unreformed Parliament of landowners that passed the excellent Act
of 1782, forbidding Members of Parliament to have an interest in
Government contracts, never thought until the eve of the Reform Bill
that there was anything remarkable in this habit of referring Enclosure
Bills to the judgment of the very landowners who were to profit by
them. And in 1825 it was not the Enclosure Bills, in which the rich
took and the poor suffered, but the Railway Bills, in which rich men
were pitted against rich men, that drew the attention of the House of
Commons to the disadvantages and risks of this procedure.
The committee so composed sets to work on the Bill, and meanwhile,
perhaps, some of the persons affected by the enclosure send petitions
against it to the House of Commons. Difficulties of time and space
would as a rule deter all but the rich dissentients, unless the
enclosure was near London. These petitions are differently treated
according to their origin. If they emanate from a lord of the manor,
or from a tithe-owner, who for some reason or other is dissatisfied
with the contemplated arrangements, they receive some attention. In
such a case the petitioner probably has some friend in Parliament, and
his point of view is understood. He can, if necessary, get this friend
to attend the committee and introduce amendments. He is therefore a
force to be reckoned with; the Bill is perhaps altered to suit him; the
petition is at any rate referred to the committee. On the other hand,
if the petition comes from cottagers or small proprietors, it is safe,
as a rule, to neglect it.
The enclosure histories set out in the Appendix supply some good
examples of this differential treatment. Lord Strafford sends a
petition against the Bill for enclosing Wakefield with the result that
he is allowed to appoint a commissioner, and also that his dispute with
the Duke of Leeds is exempted from the jurisdiction of the Enclosure
Commissioners. On the other hand, the unfortunate persons who petition
against the monstrous provision that forbade them to erect any building
for twenty, forty or sixty years, get no kind of redress. In the case
of Croydon, James Trecothick, Esq., who is dissatisfied with the
Bill, is strong enough to demand special consideration. Accordingly a
special provision is made that the commissioners are obliged to sell
Mr. Trecothick, by private contract, part of Addington Hills, if he so
wishes. But when the various freeholders, copyholders, leaseholders and
inhabitant householders of Croydon, who complain that the promoters
of the Bill have named commissioners without consulting the persons
interested, ask leave to nominate a third commissioner, only four
members of the House of Commons support Lord William Russell’s proposal
to consider this petition, and fifty-one vote the other way. Another
example of the spirit in which Parliament received petitions from
unimportant persons is furnished by the case of the enclosure of Holy
Island. In 1791 (Feb. 23)[41] a petition was presented to Parliament
for the enclosure of Holy Island, asking for the division of a stinted
pasture, and the extinction of the rights of common or ‘eatage’ over
certain infield lands. Leave was given, and the Bill was prepared and
read a first time on 28th February. The same day Parliament received
a petition from freeholders and stallingers, who ask to be heard by
themselves or by counsel against the Bill. From Eden[42] we learn that
there were 26 freeholders and 31 stallingers, and that the latter were
in the strict sense of the term as much freeholders as the former.
Whilst, however, a freeholder had the right to put 30 sheep, 4 black
cattle and 3 horses on the stinted common, a stallinger had a right
of common for one horse and one cow only. The House ordered that this
petition should lie on the table till the second reading, and that
the petitioners should then be heard. The second reading, which had
been fixed for 2nd April, was deferred till 20th April, a change which
probably put the petitioners to considerable expense. On 20th April the
Bill was read a second time, and the House was informed that Counsel
attended, and a motion was made that Counsel be now called in. But the
motion was opposed, and on a division was defeated by 47 votes to 12.
The Bill passed the House of Commons on 10th May, and received the
Royal Assent on 9th June.[43] In this case the House of Commons broke
faith with the petitioners, and refused the hearing it had promised.
Such experience was not likely to encourage dissentients to waste their
money on an appeal to Parliament against a Bill that was promoted by
powerful politicians. It will be observed that at Armley and Ashelworth
the petitioners did not think that it was worth the trouble and expense
to be heard on Second Reading.
The Report of the Committee followed a stereotyped formula: ‘That the
Standing Orders had been complied with: and that the Committee had
examined the Allegations of the Bill and found the same to be true; and
that the Parties concerned had given their Consent to the Bill, to the
Satisfaction of the Committee, except....’
Now what did this mean? What consents were necessary to satisfy the
committee? The Parliamentary Committee that reported on the cost of
enclosures in 1800[44] said that there was no fixed rule, that in
some cases the consent of three-fourths was required, in others the
consent of four-fifths. This proportion has a look of fairness until we
discover that we are dealing in terms, not of persons, but of property,
and that the suffrages were not counted but weighed. The method by
which the proportions were reckoned varied, as a glance at the cases
described in the Appendix will show. Value is calculated sometimes
in acres, sometimes in annual value, sometimes in assessment to the
land tax, sometimes in assessment to the poor rate. It is important to
remember that it was the property interested that counted, and that in
a case where there was common or waste to be divided as well as open
fields, one large proprietor, who owned a considerable property in old
enclosures, could swamp the entire community of smaller proprietors
and cottagers. If Squire Western owned an enclosed estate with parks,
gardens and farms of 800 acres, and the rest of the parish consisted of
a common or waste of 1000 acres and open fields of 200 acres, and the
village population consisted of 100 cottagers and small farmers, each
with a strip of land in the common fields, and a right of common on the
waste, Squire Western would have a four-fifths majority in determining
whether the open fields and the waste should be enclosed or not, and
the whole matter would be in his hands. This is an extreme example of
the way in which the system worked. The case of Ashelworth shows that
a common might be cut up, on the votes of persons holding enclosed
property, against the wishes of the great majority of the commoners.
At Laleham the petitioners against the Bill claimed that they were
‘a great majority of the real Owners and Proprietors of or Persons
interested in, the Lands and Grounds intended to be enclosed.’ At
Simpson, where common fields were to be enclosed, the Major Part of the
Owners and Proprietors petitioned against the Bill, stating that they
were ‘very well satisfied with the Situation and Convenience of their
respective Lands and Properties in their present uninclosed State.’[45]
Even a majority of three-fourths in value was not always required; for
example, the Report of the Committee on the enclosure of Cartmel in
Lancashire in 1796 gave particulars showing that the whole property
belonging to persons interested in the enclosure was assessed at £150,
and that the property of those actually consenting to the enclosure was
just under £110.[46] Yet the enclosure was recommended and carried.
Another illustration is supplied by the Report of the Committee on
the enclosure of Histon and Impington in 1801, where the parties
concerned are reported to have consented except the proprietors of 1020
acres, out of a total acreage of 3680.[47] In this case the Bill was
recommitted, and on its next appearance the committee gave the consents
in terms of assessment to the Land Tax instead, putting the total
figure at £304, and the assessment of the consenting parties at £188.
This seems to have satisfied the House of Commons.[48] Further, the
particulars given in the case of the enclosure of Bishopstone in Wilts
(enclosed in 1809) show that the votes of copyholders were heavily
discounted. In this case the copyholders who dissented held 1079 acres,
the copyholders who were neuter 81 acres, and the total area to be
divided was 2602 acres. But by some ingenious actuarial calculation of
the reversionary interest of the lord of the manor and the interest
of the tithe-owner, the 1079 acres held by copyholders are written
down to 474 acres.[49] In the cases of Simpson and Louth, as readers
who consult the Appendix will see, the committees were satisfied with
majorities just above three-fifths in value. At Raunds (see p. 39),
where 4963 acres were ‘interested,’ the owners of 570 are stated to be
against, and of 721 neuter.[50] An interesting illustration of the lax
practice of the committees is provided in the history of an attempted
enclosure at Quainton (1801).[51] In any case the signatures were a
doubtful evidence of consent. ‘It is easy,’ wrote an acute observer,
‘for the large proprietors to overcome opposition. Coaxing, bribing,
threatening, together with many other acts which superiors will make
use of, often induce the inferiors to consent to things which they
think will be to their future disadvantage.’[52] We hear echoes of such
proceedings in the petition from various owners and proprietors at
Armley, who ‘at the instance of several other owners of land,’ signed
a petition for enclosure and wish to be heard against it, and also in
the unavailing petition of some of the proprietors and freeholders of
Winfrith Newburgh in Dorsetshire, in 1768,[53] who declared that if the
Bill passed into law, their ‘Estates must be totally ruined thereby,
and that some of the Petitioners by Threats and Menaces were prevailed
upon to sign the Petition for the said Bill: but upon Recollection,
and considering the impending Ruin,’ they prayed to ‘have Liberty to
retract from their seeming Acquiescence.’ From the same case we learn
that it was the practice sometimes to grant copyholds on the condition
that the tenant would undertake not to oppose enclosure. Sometimes, as
in the case of the Sedgmoor Enclosure, which we shall discuss later,
actual fraud was employed. But even if the promoters employed no unfair
methods they had one argument powerful enough to be a deterrent in many
minds. For an opposed Enclosure Bill was much more expensive than an
unopposed Bill, and as the small men felt the burden of the costs much
more than the large proprietors, they would naturally be shy of adding
to the very heavy expenses unless they stood a very good chance of
defeating the scheme.
It is of capital importance to remember in this connection that the
enumeration of ‘consents’ took account only of proprietors. It ignored
entirely two large classes to whom enclosure meant, not a greater or
less degree of wealth, but actual ruin. These were such cottagers as
enjoyed their rights of common in virtue of renting cottages to which
such rights were attached, and those cottagers and squatters who either
had no strict legal right, or whose rights were difficult of proof.
Neither of these classes was treated even outwardly and formally as
having any claim to be consulted before an enclosure was sanctioned.
It is clear, then, that it was only the pressure of the powerful
interests that decided whether a committee should approve or disapprove
of an Enclosure Bill. It was the same pressure that determined the
form in which a Bill became law. For a procedure that enabled rich men
to fight out their rival claims at Westminster left the classes that
could not send counsel to Parliament without a weapon or a voice. And
if there was no lawyer there to put his case, what prospect was there
that the obscure cottager, who was to be turned adrift with his family
by an Enclosure Bill promoted by a Member or group of Members, would
ever trouble the conscience of a committee of landowners? We have seen
already how this class was regarded by the landowners and the champions
of enclosure. No cottagers had votes or the means of influencing a
single vote at a single election. To Parliament, if they had any
existence at all, they were merely dim shadows in the very background
of the enclosure scheme. It would require a considerable effort of the
imagination to suppose that the Parliamentary Committee spent very much
time or energy on the attempt to give body and form to this hazy and
remote society, and to treat these shadows as living men and women,
about to be tossed by this revolution from their ancestral homes. As it
happens, we need not put ourselves to the trouble of such speculation,
for we have the evidence of a witness who will not be suspected
of injustice to his class. ‘This I know,’ said Lord Lincoln[54]
introducing the General Enclosure Bill of 1845, ‘that in nineteen
cases out of twenty, Committees of this House sitting on private Bills
neglected the rights of the poor. I do not say that they wilfully
neglected those rights--far from it: but this I affirm, that they were
neglected in consequence of the Committees being permitted to remain
in ignorance of the claims of the poor man, because by reason of his
very poverty he is unable to come up to London for counsel, to produce
witnesses, and to urge his claims before a Committee of this House.’
Another Member[55] had described a year earlier the character of this
private Bill procedure. ‘Inclosure Bills had been introduced heretofore
and passed without discussion, and no one could tell how many persons
had suffered in their interests and rights by the interference of these
Bills. Certainly these Bills had been referred to Committees upstairs,
but everyone knew how these Committees were generally conducted. They
were attended only by honourable Members who were interested in them,
being Lords of Manor, and the rights of the poor, though they might be
talked about, had frequently been taken away under that system.’
These statements were made by politicians who remembered well the
system they were describing. There is another witness whose authority
is even greater. In 1781 Lord Thurlow, then at the beginning of his
long life of office as Lord Chancellor,[56] spoke for an hour and three
quarters in favour of recommitting the Bill for enclosing Ilmington
in Warwickshire. If the speech had been fully reported it would be
a contribution of infinite value to students of the social history
of eighteenth-century England, for we are told that ‘he proceeded
to examine, paragraph by paragraph, every provision of the Bill,
animadverting and pointing out some acts of injustice, partiality,
obscurity or cause of confusion in each.’[57] Unfortunately this part
of his speech was omitted in the report as being ‘irrelative to the
debate,’ which was concerned with the question of the propriety of
commuting tithes. But the report, incomplete as it is, contains an
illuminating passage on the conduct of Private Bill Committees. ‘His
Lordship ... next turned his attention to the mode in which private
bills were permitted to make their way through both Houses, and that in
matters in which property was concerned, to the great injury of many,
if not the total ruin of some private families: many proofs of this
evil had come to his knowledge as a member of the other House, not a
few in his professional character, before he had the honour of a seat
in that House, nor had he been a total stranger to such evils since he
was called upon to preside in another place.’ Going on to speak of the
committees of the House of Commons and ‘the rapidity with which private
Bills were hurried through,’ he declared that ‘it was not unfrequent
to decide upon the merits of a Bill which would affect the property
and interests of persons inhabiting a district of several miles in
extent, in less time than it took him to determine upon the propriety
of issuing an order for a few pounds, by which no man’s property
could be injured.’ He concluded by telling the House of Lords a story
of how Sir George Savile once noticed a man ‘rather meanly habited’
watching the proceedings of a committee with anxious interest. When the
committee had agreed on its report, the agitated spectator was seen to
be in great distress. Sir George Savile asked him what was the matter,
and he found that the man would be ruined by a clause that had been
passed by the committee, and that, having heard that the Bill was to be
introduced, he had made his way to London on foot, too poor to come in
any other way or to fee counsel. Savile then made inquiries and learnt
that these statements were correct, whereupon he secured the amendment
of the Bill, ‘by which means an innocent, indigent man and his family
were rescued from destruction.’ It would not have been very easy for a
‘meanly habited man’ to make the journey to London from Wakefield or
Knaresborough or Haute Huntre, even if he knew when a Bill was coming
on, and to stay in London until it went into committee; and if he did,
he would not always be so lucky as to find a Sir George Savile on the
committee--the public man who was regarded by his contemporaries, to
whatever party they belonged, as the Bayard of politics.[58]
We get very few glimpses into the underworld of the common and obscure
people, whose homes and fortunes trembled on the chance that a quarrel
over tithes and the conflicting claims of squire and parson might
disturb the unanimity of a score of gentlemen sitting round a table.
London was far away, and the Olympian peace of Parliament was rarely
broken by the protests of its victims. But we get one such glimpse in a
passage in the _Annual Register_ for 1767.
‘On Tuesday evening a great number of farmers were observed going along
Pall Mall with cockades in their hats. On enquiring the reason, it
appeared they all lived in or near the parish of Stanwell in the county
of Middlesex, and they were returning to their wives and families to
carry them the agreeable news of a Bill being rejected for inclosing
the said common, which if carried into execution, might have been the
ruin of a great number of families.’[59]
When the Committee on the Enclosure Bill had reported to the House of
Commons, the rest of the proceedings were generally formal. The Bill
was read a third time, engrossed, sent up to the Lords, where petitions
might be presented as in the Commons, and received the Royal Assent.
A study of the pages of Hansard and Debrett tells us little about
transactions that fill the _Journals_ of the Houses of Parliament.
Three debates in the House of Lords are fully reported,[60] and they
illustrate the play of forces at Westminster. The Bishop of St.
Davids[61] moved to recommit an Enclosure Bill in 1781 on the ground
that, like many other Enclosure Bills, it provided for the commutation
of tithes--an arrangement which he thought open to many objections.
Here was an issue that was vital, for it concerned the interests of
the classes represented in Parliament. Did the Church stand to gain or
to lose by taking land instead of tithe? Was it a bad thing or a good
thing that the parson should be put into the position of a farmer, that
he should be under the temptation to enter into an arrangement with
the landlord which might prejudice his successor, that he should be
relieved from a system which often caused bad blood between him and his
parishioners? Would it ‘make him neglect the sacred functions of his
ministry’ as the Bishop of St. Davids feared, or would it improve his
usefulness by rescuing him from a situation in which ‘the pastor was
totally sunk in the tithe-collector’ as the Bishop of Peterborough[62]
hoped, and was a man a better parson on the Sunday for being a farmer
the rest of the week as Lord Coventry believed? The bishops and the
peers had in this discussion a subject that touched very nearly the
lives and interests of themselves and their friends, and there was a
considerable and animated debate,[63] at the end of which the House of
Lords approved the principle of commuting tithes in Enclosure Bills.
This debate was followed by another on 6th April, when Lord Bathurst
(President of the Council) as a counterblast to his colleague on the
Woolsack, moved, but afterwards withdrew, a series of resolutions on
the same subject. In the course of this debate Thurlow, who thought
perhaps that his zeal for the Church had surprised and irritated
his fellow-peers, among whom he was not conspicuous in life as a
practising Christian, explained that though he was zealous for the
Church, ‘his zeal was not partial or confined to the Church, further
than it was connected with the other great national establishments,
of which it formed a part, and no inconsiderable one.’ The Bishop
of St. Davids returned to the subject on the 14th June, moving to
recommit the Bill for enclosing Kington in Worcestershire. He read a
string of resolutions which he wished to see applied to all future
Enclosure Bills, in order to defend the interests of the clergy from
‘the oppressions of the Lord of the Manor, landowners, etc.’ Thurlow
spoke for him, but he was defeated by 24 votes to 4, his only other
supporters being Lord Galloway and the Bishop of Lincoln.
Thurlow’s story of Sir George Savile’s ‘meanly habited man’ did not
disturb the confidence of the House of Lords in the justice of the
existing procedure towards the poor: the enclosure debates revolve
solely round the question of the relative claims of the lord of the
manor and the tithe-owner. The House of Commons was equally free
from scruple or misgiving. One petitioner in 1800 commented on the
extraordinary haste with which a New Forest Bill was pushed through
Parliament, and suggested that if it were passed into law in this rapid
manner at the end of a session, some injustice might unconsciously be
done. The Speaker replied with a grave and dignified rebuke: ‘The House
was always competent to give every subject the consideration due to its
importance, and could not therefore be truly said to be incapable at
any time of discussing any question gravely, dispassionately, and with
strict regard to justice.’[64] He recommended that the petition should
be passed over as if it had never been presented. The member who had
presented the petition pleaded that he had not read it. Such were the
plausibilities and decorum in which the House of Commons wrapped up
its abuses. We can imagine that some of the members must have smiled
to each other like the Roman augurs, when they exchanged these solemn
hypocrisies.
We have a sidelight on the vigilance of the House of Commons, when an
Enclosure Bill came down from a committee, in a speech of Windham’s
in defence of bull-baiting. Windham attacked the politicians who
had introduced the Bill to abolish bull-baiting, for raising such a
question at a time of national crisis when Parliament ought to be
thinking of other things. He then went on to compare the subject to
local subjects that ‘contained nothing of public or general interest.
To procure the discussion of such subjects it was necessary to resort
to canvass and intrigue. Members whose attendance was induced by
local considerations in most cases of this description, were present:
the discussion, if any took place, was managed by the friends of
the measure: and the decision of the House was ultimately, perhaps,
a matter of mere chance.’ From Sheridan’s speech in answer, we
learn that this is a description of the passing of Enclosure Bills.
‘Another honourable gentleman who had opposed this Bill with peculiar
vehemence, considered it as one of those light and trivial subjects,
which was not worthy to occupy the deliberations of Parliament: and
he compared it to certain other subjects of Bills: that is to say,
bills of a local nature, respecting inclosures and other disposal of
property, which merely passed by chance, as Members could not be got
to attend their progress by dint of canvassing.’[65] Doubtless most
Members of the House of Commons shared the sentiments of Lord Sandwich,
who told the House of Lords that he was so satisfied ‘that the more
inclosures the better, that as far as his poor abilities would enable
him, he would support every inclosure bill that should be brought into
the House.’[66]
For the last act of an enclosure drama the scene shifts back to the
parish. The commissioners arrive, receive and determine claims,
and publish an award, mapping out the new village. The life and
business of the village are now in suspense, and the commissioners
are often authorised to prescribe the course of husbandry during the
transition.[67] The Act which they administer provides that a certain
proportion of the land is to be assigned to the lord of the manor, in
virtue of his rights, and a certain proportion to the owner of the
tithes. An occasional Act provides that some small allotment shall be
made to the poor: otherwise the commissioners have a free hand: their
powers are virtually absolute. This is the impression left by all
contemporary writers. Arthur Young, for example, writes emphatically
in this sense. ‘Thus is the property of proprietors, and especially of
the poor ones, entirely at their mercy: every passion of resentment
and prejudice may be gratified without control, for they are vested
with a despotic power known in no other branch of business in this
free country.’[68] Similar testimony is found in the Report of the
Select Committee (1800) on the Expense and Mode of Obtaining Bills of
Enclosure: ‘the expediency of despatch, without the additional expense
of multiplied litigation, has suggested the necessity of investing them
with a summary, and in most cases uncontrollable jurisdiction.’[69] In
the General Report of the Board of Agriculture on Enclosures, published
in 1808, though any more careful procedure is deprecated as likely to
cause delay, it is stated that the adjusting of property worth £50,000
was left to the arbitration of a majority of five, ‘often persons
of mean education.’ The author of _An Inquiry into the Advantages
and Disadvantages resulting from Bills of Inclosure_, published in
1781, writes as if it was the practice to allow an appeal to Quarter
Sessions; such an appeal he characterised as useless to a poor man,
and we can well believe that most of the squires who sat on such a
tribunal to punish vagrants or poachers had had a hand in an enclosure
in the past or had their eyes on an enclosure in the future. Thurlow
considered such an appeal quite inadequate, giving the more polite
reason that Quarter Sessions had not the necessary time.[70] The Act
of 1801 is silent on the subject, but Sinclair’s draft of a General
Inclosure Bill, published in the _Annals of Agriculture_ in 1796,[71]
provided for an appeal to Quarter Sessions. It will be seen that in
five of the cases analysed in the Appendix (Haute Huntre, Simpson,
Stanwell, Wakefield and Winfrith Newburgh), the decision of the
commissioners on claims was final, except that at Wakefield an objector
might oblige the commissioners to take the opinion of a counsel chosen
by themselves. In five cases (Ashelworth, Croydon, Cheshunt, Laleham
and Louth), a disappointed claimant might bring a suit on a feigned
issue against a proprietor. At Armley and Knaresborough the final
decision was left to arbitrators, but whereas at Armley the arbitrator
was to be chosen by a neutral authority, the Recorder of Leeds, the
arbitrators at Knaresborough were named in the Act, and were presumably
as much the nominees of the promoters as the commissioners themselves.
The statements of contemporaries already quoted go to show that none
of these arrangements were regarded as seriously fettering the power
of the commissioners, and it is easy to understand that a lawsuit,
which might of course overwhelm him, was not a remedy for the use of a
small proprietor or a cottager, though it might be of some advantage
to a large proprietor who had not been fortunate enough to secure
adequate representation of his interests on the Board of Commissioners.
But the decision as to claims was only part of the business. A man’s
claim might be allowed, and yet gross injustice might be done him in
the redistribution. He might be given inferior land, or land in an
inconvenient position. In ten of the cases in the Appendix the award
of the commissioners is stated to be final, and there is no appeal from
it. The two exceptions are Knaresborough and Armley. The Knaresborough
Act is silent on the point, and the Armley Act allows an appeal to the
Recorder of Leeds. So far therefore as the claims and allotments of
the poor were concerned, the commissioners were in no danger of being
overruled. Their freedom in other ways was restricted by the Standing
Orders of 1774, which obliged them to give an account of their expenses.
It would seem to be obvious that any society which had an elementary
notion of the meaning and importance of justice would have taken the
utmost pains to see that the men appointed to this extraordinary office
had no motive for showing partiality. This might not unreasonably
have been expected of the society about which Pitt declared in the
House of Commons, that it was the boast of the law of England that
it afforded equal security and protection to the high and low, the
rich and poor.[72] How were these commissioners appointed at the time
that Pitt was Prime Minister? They were appointed in each case before
the Bill was presented to Parliament, and generally, as Young tells
us, they were appointed by the promoters of the enclosure before the
petition was submitted for local signatures, so that in fact they
were nominated by the persons of influence who agreed on the measure.
In one case (Moreton Corbet in Shropshire; 1950 acres enclosed in
1797) the Act appointed one commissioner only, and he was to name
his successor. Sometimes, as in the case of Otmoor,[73] it might
happen that the commissioners were changed while the Bill was passing
through Committee, if some powerful persons were able to secure better
representation of their own interests. In the case of Wakefield again,
the House of Commons Committee placated Lord Strafford by giving him a
commissioner.
Now, who was supposed to have a voice in the appointment of the
commissioners? There is to be found in the _Annals of Agriculture_[74]
an extremely interesting paper by Sir John Sinclair, preliminary
to a memorandum of the General Enclosure Bill which he promoted in
1796. Sinclair explains that he had had eighteen hundred Enclosure
Acts (taken indiscriminately) examined in order to ascertain what
was the usual procedure and what stipulations were made with regard
to particular interests; this with the intention of incorporating
the recognised practice in his General Bill. In the course of these
remarks he says, ‘the probable result will be the appointment of one
Commissioner by the Lord of the Manor, of another by the tithe-owner,
and of a third by the major part in value of the proprietors.’[75] It
will be observed that the third commissioner is not appointed by a
majority of the commoners, nor even by the majority of the proprietors,
but by the votes of those who own the greater part of the village. This
enables us to assess the value of what might have seemed a safeguard
to the poor--the provision that the names of the commissioners should
appear in the Bill presented to Parliament. The lord of the manor, the
impropriator of tithes, and the majority in value of the owners are a
small minority of the persons affected by an enclosure, and all that
they have to do is to meet round a table and name the commissioners
who are to represent them.[76] Thus we find that the powerful persons
who carried an enclosure against the will of the poor nominated the
tribunal before which the poor had to make good their several claims.
This was the way in which the constitution that Pitt was defending
afforded equal security and protection to the rich and to the poor.
It will be noticed further that two interests are chosen out for
special representation. They are the lord of the manor and the
impropriator of tithes: in other words, the very persons who are
formally assigned a certain minimum in the distribution by the Act
of Parliament. Every Act after 1774 declares that the lord of the
manor is to have a certain proportion, and the tithe-owner a certain
proportion of the land divided: scarcely any Act stipulates that any
share at all is to go to the cottager or the small proprietor. Yet in
the appointment of commissioners the interests that are protected by
the Act have a preponderating voice, and the interests that are left
to the caprice of the commissioners have no voice at all. Thurlow,
speaking in the House of Lords in 1781,[77] said that it was grossly
unjust to the parson that his property should be at the disposal of
these commissioners, of whom he only nominated one. ‘He thanked God
that the property of an Englishman depended not on so loose a tribunal
in any other instance whatever.’ What, then, was the position of the
poor and the small farmers who were not represented at all among the
commissioners? In the paper already quoted, Sinclair mentions that
in some cases the commissioners were peers, gentlemen and clergymen,
residing in the neighbourhood, who acted without fees or emolument. He
spoke of this as undertaking a useful duty, and it does not seem to
have occurred to him that there was any objection to such a practice.
‘To lay down the principle that men are to serve for nothing,’ said
Cobbett, in criticising the system of unpaid magistrates, ‘puts me in
mind of the servant who went on hire, who being asked what wages he
demanded, said he wanted no wages: for that he always found about the
house little things to pick up.’
There is a curious passage in the General Report of the Board of
Agriculture[78] on the subject of the appointment of commissioners. The
writer, after dwelling on the unexampled powers that the commissioners
enjoy, remarks that they are not likely to be abused, because a
commissioner’s prospect of future employment in this profitable
capacity depends on his character for integrity and justice. This is
a reassuring reflection for the classes that promoted enclosures and
appointed commissioners, but it rings with a very different sound in
other ears. It would clearly have been much better for the poor if the
commissioners had not had any prospect of future employment at all. We
can obtain some idea of the kind of men whom the landowners considered
to be competent and satisfactory commissioners from the Standing Orders
of 1801, which forbade the employment in this capacity of the bailiff
of the lord of the manor. It would be interesting to know how much of
England was appropriated on the initiative of the lord of the manor, by
his bailiff, acting under the authority given to him by the High Court
of Parliament. It is significant, too, that down to 1801 a commissioner
was only debarred from buying land in a parish in which he had acted in
this capacity, until his award was made. The Act of 1801 debarred him
from buying land under such circumstances for the following five years.
The share of the small man in these transactions from first to last
can be estimated from the language of Arthur Young in 1770. ‘The small
proprietor whose property in the township is perhaps his all, has
little or no weight in regulating the clauses of the Act of Parliament,
has seldom, if ever, an opportunity of putting a single one in the Bill
favourable to his rights, and has as little influence in the choice of
Commissioners.’[79] But even this description does less than justice
to his helplessness. There remains to be considered the procedure
before the commissioners themselves. Most Enclosure Acts specified a
date before which all claims had to be presented. It is obvious that
there must have been very many small proprietors who had neither the
courage nor the knowledge necessary to put and defend their case, and
that vast numbers of claims must have been disregarded because they
were not presented, or because they were presented too late, or because
they were irregular in form. The Croydon Act, for example, prescribes
that claimants must send in their claims ‘in Writing under their Hands,
or the Hands of their Agents, distinguishing in such Claims the Tenure
of the Estates in respect whereof such Claims are made, and stating
therein such further Particulars as shall be necessary to describe
such Claims with Precision.’ And if this was a difficult fence for the
small proprietor, unaccustomed to legal forms and documents, or to
forms and documents of any kind, what was the plight of the cottager?
Let us imagine the cottager, unable to read or write, enjoying certain
customary rights of common without any idea of their origin or history
or legal basis: knowing only that as long as he can remember he has
kept a cow, driven geese across the waste, pulled his fuel out of the
neighbouring brushwood, and cut turf from the common, and that his
father did all these things before him. The cottager learns that before
a certain day he has to present to his landlord’s bailiff, or to the
parson, or to one of the magistrates into whose hands perhaps he has
fallen before now over a little matter of a hare or a partridge, or to
some solicitor from the country town, a clear and correct statement
of his rights and his claim to a share in the award. Let us remember
at the same time all that we know from Fielding and Smollett of the
reputation of lawyers for cruelty to the poor. Is a cottager to be
trusted to face the ordeal, or to be in time with his statement, or to
have that statement in proper legal form? The commissioners can reject
his claim on the ground of any technical irregularity, as we learn
from a petition presented to Parliament in 1774 by several persons
interested in the enclosure of Knaresborough Forest, whose claims
had been disallowed by the commissioners because of certain ‘mistakes
made in the description of such tenements ... notwithstanding the said
errors were merely from inadvertency, and in no way altered the merits
of the petitioners’ claims.’ A Bill was before Parliament to amend
the previous Act for enclosing Knaresborough Forest, in respect of
the method of payment of expenses, and hence these petitioners had an
opportunity of making their treatment public.[80] It is easy to guess
what was the fate of many a small proprietor or cottager, who had to
describe his tenement or common right to an unsympathetic tribunal.
We are not surprised that one of the witnesses told the Enclosure
Committee of 1844 that the poor often did not know what their claims
were, or how to present them. It is significant that in the case of
Sedgmoor, out of 4063 claims sent in, only 1798 were allowed.[81]
* * * * *
We have now given an account of the procedure by which Parliamentary
enclosures were carried out. We give elsewhere a detailed analysis,
disentangled from the _Journals_ of Parliament and other sources, of
particular enclosures. We propose to give here two illustrations of the
temper of the Parliamentary Committees. One illustration is provided by
a speech made by Sir William Meredith, one of the Rockingham Whigs, in
1772, a speech that needs no comment. ‘Sir William Meredith moved, That
it might be a general order, that no Bill, or clause in a Bill, making
any offence capital, should be agreed to but in a Committee of the
whole House. He observed, that at present the facility of passing such
clauses was shameful: that he once passing a Committee-room, when only
one Member was holding a Committee, with a clerk’s boy, he happened
to hear something of hanging; he immediately had the curiosity to ask
what was going forward in that small Committee that could merit such a
punishment? He was answered, that it was an Inclosing Bill, in which
a great many poor people were concerned, who opposed the Bill; that
they feared those people would obstruct the execution of the Act, and
therefore this clause was to make it capital felony in anyone who did
so. This resolution was unanimously agreed to.’[82]
The other illustration is provided by the history of an attempted
enclosure in which we can watch the minds of the chief actors without
screen or disguise of any kind: in this case we have very fortunately a
vivid revelation of the spirit and manner in which Committees conducted
their business, from the pen of the chairman himself. George Selwyn
gives us in his letters, published in the _Carlisle Papers_, a view
of the proceedings from the inside. It is worth while to set out in
some detail the passages from these letters published in the _Carlisle
Papers_, by way of supplementing and explaining the official records of
the House of Commons.
We learn from the _Journals_ of the House of Commons that, on 10th
November, 1775, a petition was presented to the House of Commons
for the enclosure of King’s Sedgmoor, in the County of Somerset,
the petitioners urging that this land was of very little value in
its present state, and that it was capable of great improvement by
enclosure and drainage. Leave was given to bring in a Bill, to be
prepared by Mr. St. John and Mr. Coxe. Mr. St. John was brother of
Lord Bolingbroke. On 13th November, the Bill was presented and read
a first time. Four days later it received a second reading, and was
sent to a Committee of Mr. St. John and others. At this point, those
who objected to the enclosure began to take action. First of all there
is a petition from William Waller, Esq., who says that under a grant
of Charles I. he is entitled to the soil of the moor: it is agreed
that he shall be heard by counsel before the Committee. The next day
there arrives a petition from owners and occupiers in thirty-five
‘parishes, hamlets and places,’ who state that all these parishes have
enjoyed rights of common without discrimination over the 18,000 acres
of pasture on Sedgmoor: that these rights of pasture and cutting turf
and rushes and sedges have existed from time immemorial, and that no
Enclosure Act is wanted for the draining of Sedgmoor, because an Act of
the reign of William III. had conferred all the necessary powers for
this purpose on the Justices of the Peace. The petitioners prayed to be
heard by themselves and counsel against the application for enclosure
on Committee and on Report. The House of Commons ordered that the
petition should lie on the Table, and that the petitioners should be
heard when the Report had been received from Committee. Five days later
three lords of manors (Sir Charles Kemys Tynte, Baronet, Copleston
Warre Bampfylde, Esq., and William Hawker, Esq.) petition against the
Bill and complain of the haste with which the promoters are pushing
the Bill through Parliament. This petition is taken more seriously: a
motion is made and defeated to defer the Bill for two months, but the
House orders that the petitioners shall be heard before the Committee.
Two of these three lords of manor present a further petition early in
December, stating that they and their tenants are more than a majority
in number and value of the persons interested, and a second petition
is also presented by the thirty-seven parishes and hamlets already
mentioned, in which it is contended that, in spite of the difficulties
of collecting signatures in a scattered district in a very short time,
749 persons interested had already signed the petition against the
Bill, that the effect of the Bill had been misrepresented to many of
the tenants, that the facts as to the different interests affected had
been misrepresented to the Committee, that the number and rights of
the persons supporting the Bill had been exaggerated (only 213 having
signed their names as consenting), and that if justice was to be done
to the various parties concerned, it was essential that time should be
given for the hearing of complaints and the circulation of the Bill in
the district. This petition was presented on 11th December, and the
House of Commons ordered that the petitioners should be heard when the
Report was received. Next day Mr. Selwyn, as Chairman of the Committee,
presented a Report in favour of the Bill, mentioning among other things
that the number of tenements concerned was 1269, and that 303 refused
to sign; but attention was drawn to the fact that there were several
variations between the Bill as it was presented to the House, and the
Bill as it was presented to the parties concerned for their consent,
and on this ground the Bill was defeated by 59 to 35 votes.
This is the cold impersonal account of the proceedings given in the
official journals, but the letters of Selwyn take us behind the scenes
and supply a far livelier picture.[83] His account begins with a letter
to Lord Carlisle in November:
‘Bully has a scheme of enclosure, which, if it succeeds, I am told
will free him from all his difficulties. It is to come into our House
immediately. If I had this from a better judgment than that of our
sanguine counsellors, I should have more hopes from it. I am ready to
allow that he has been very faulty, but I cannot help wishing to see
him once more on his legs....’
(Bully, of course, is Bolingbroke, brother of St. John, called the
counsellor, author of the Bill.) We learn from this letter that there
are other motives than a passion to drain Sedgmoor in the promotion of
this great improvement scheme. We learn from the next letter that it is
not only Bully’s friends and creditors who have some reason for wishing
it well:
‘Stavordale is returning to Redlinch; I believe that he sets out
to-morrow. He is also deeply engaged in this Sedgmoor Bill, and it
is supposed that he or Lord Ilchester, which you please, will get
2000_l._ a year by it. He will get more, or save more at least, by
going away and leaving the Moor in my hands, for he told me himself
the other night that this last trip to town had cost him 4000_l._’
Another letter warns Lord Carlisle that the only way to get his
creditors to pay their debts to him, when they come into their money
through the enclosure, is to press for payment, and goes on to describe
the unexpected opposition the Bill had encountered. Selwyn had been
made chairman of the Committee.
‘... My dear Lord, if your delicacy is such that you will not be
pressing with him about it, you may be assured that you will never
receive a farthing. I have spoke to Hare about it, who [was] kept
in it till half an hour after 4; as I was also to-day, and shall be
to-morrow. I thought that it was a matter of form only, but had no
sooner begun to read the preamble to the Bill, but I found myself in a
nest of hornets. The room was full, and an opposition made to it, and
disputes upon every word, which kept me in the Chair, as I have told
you. I have gained it seems great reputation, and am at this minute
reputed one of the best Chairmen upon this stand. Bully and Harry came
home and dined with me....’
The next letter, written on 9th December, shows that Selwyn is afraid
that Stavordale may not get his money out of his father, and also that
he is becoming still more anxious about the fate of the Enclosure Bill,
on which of course the whole pack of cards depends:
‘... I have taken the liberty to talk a good deal to Lord Stavordale,
partly for his own sake and partly for yours, and pressed him much to
get out of town as soon as possible, and not quit Lord I. [Ilchester]
any more. His attention there cannot be of long duration, and his
absence may be fatal to us all. I painted it in very strong colours,
and he has promised me to go, as soon as this Sedgmoor Bill is
reported. I moved to have Tuesday fixed for it. We had a debate and
division upon my motion, and this Bill will at last not go down so
glibly as Bully hoped that it would. It will meet with more opposition
in the H. of Lords, and Lord North being adverse to it, does us no
good. Lord Ilchester gets, it is said, £5000 a year by it, and amongst
others Sir C. Tynte something, who, for what reason I cannot yet
comprehend, opposes it....’
The next letter describes the final catastrophe:
‘December 12. Tuesday night.... Bully has lost his Bill. I reported
it to-day, and the Question was to withdraw it. There were 59 against
us, and we were 35. It was worse managed by the agents, supposing no
treachery, than ever business was. Lord North, Robinson, and Keene
divided against. Charles[84] said all that could be said on our side.
But as the business was managed, it was the worst Question that I
ever voted for. We were a Committee absolutely of Almack’s,[85] so
if the Bill is not resumed, and better conducted and supported, this
phantom of 30,000_l._ clear in Bully’s pocket to pay off his annuities
vanishes.
‘It is surprising what a fatality attends some people’s proceedings.
I begged last night as for alms, that they would meet me to settle
the Votes. I have, since I have been in Parliament, been of twenty
at least of these meetings, and always brought numbers down by those
means. But my advice was slighted, and twenty people were walking
about the streets who could have carried this point.
‘The cause was not bad, but the Question was totally indigestible.
The most conscientious man in the House in Questions of this nature,
Sir F. Drake, a very old acquaintance of mine, told me that nothing
could be so right as the enclosure. But they sent one Bill into
the country for the assent of the people interested, and brought
me another, differing in twenty particulars, to carry through the
Committee, without once mentioning to me that the two Bills differed.
This they thought was cunning, and I believe a happy composition of
Bully’s cunning and John’s idea of his own parts. I had no idea, or
could have, of this difference. The adverse party said nothing of it,
_comme de raison_, reserving the objection till the Report, and it
was insurmountable. If one of the Clerks only had hinted it to me,
inexperienced as I am in these sort of Bills, I would have stopped it,
and by that means have given them a better chance by a new Bill than
they can have now, that people will have a pretence for not altering
their opinion....’
These letters compensate for the silence of Hansard, so real and
instructive a picture do they present of the methods and motives of
enclosure. ‘Bully has a scheme of enclosure which, if it succeeds, I
am told will free him from all his difficulties.’ The journals may talk
of the undrained fertility of Sedgmoor, but we have in this sentence
the aspect of the enclosure that interests Selwyn, the Chairman of
the Committee, and from beginning to end of the proceedings no other
aspect ever enters his head. And it interests a great many other people
besides Selwyn, for Bully owes money; so too does Stavordale, another
prospective beneficiary: he owes money to Fox, and Fox owes money to
Carlisle. Now Bully and Stavordale are not the only eighteenth-century
aristocrats who are in difficulties; the waiters at Brooks’s and at
White’s know that well enough, as Selwyn felt when, on hearing that
one of them had been arrested for felony, he exclaimed, ‘What an idea
of us he will give in Newgate.’ Nor is Bully the only aristocrat in
difficulties whose thoughts turn to enclosure; Selwyn’s letters alone,
with their reference to previous successes, would make that clear. It
is here that we begin to appreciate the effect of our system of family
settlements in keeping the aristocracy together. These young men, whose
fortunes come and go in the hurricanes of the faro table, would soon
have dissipated their estates if they had been free to do it; as they
were restrained by settlements, they could only mortgage them. But
there is a limit to this process, and after a time their debts begin
to overwhelm them; perhaps also too many of their fellow gamblers are
their creditors to make Brooks’s or White’s quite as comfortable a
place as it used to be, for we may doubt whether all of these creditors
were troubled with Lord Carlisle’s morbid delicacy of feeling. Happily
there is an escape from this painful situation: a scheme of enclosure
which will put him ‘once more on his legs.’ The other parties concerned
are generally poor men, and there is not much danger of failure. Thus
if we trace the adventures of the gaming table to their bitter end, we
begin to understand that these wild revellers are gambling not with
their own estates but with the estates of their neighbours. This is the
only property they can realise. _Quidquid delirant reges plectuntur
Achivi._
The particular obstacle on which the scheme split was a fraudulent
irregularity: the Bill submitted for signature to the inhabitants
differing seriously (in twenty particulars) from the Bill presented
to Parliament. Selwyn clearly attached no importance at all to the
Petitions that were received against the Bill, or to the evidence of
its local unpopularity. It is clear too, that it was very rare for a
scheme like this to miscarry, for, speaking of his becoming Chairman
of the Committee, he adds, ‘I thought it was a matter of form only.’
Further with a little care this project would have weathered the
discovery of the fraud of which the authors were guilty. ‘I begged
last night as for alms that they would meet us to settle the Votes.
I have, since I have been in Parliament, been of twenty at least of
these meetings, and always brought numbers down by these means. But my
advice was slighted, and twenty people were walking about the streets
who could have carried this point.’ In other words, the Bill would
have been carried, all its iniquities notwithstanding, if only Bully’s
friends had taken Selwyn’s advice and put themselves out to go down
to Westminster. So little impression did this piece of trickery make
on the mind of the Chairman of the Committee, that he intended to the
last, by collecting his friends, to carry the Bill, for the fairness
and good order of which he was responsible, through the House of
Commons. This glimpse into the operations of the Committee enables us
to picture the groups of comrades who sauntered down from Almack’s of
an afternoon to carve up a manor in Committee of the House of Commons.
We can see Bully’s friends meeting round the table in their solemn
character of judges and legislators, to give a score of villages to
Bully, and a dozen to Stavordale, much as Artaxerxes gave Magnesia to
Themistocles for his bread, Myus for his meat and Lampsacus for his
wine. And if those friends happened to be Bully’s creditors as well,
it would perhaps not be unjust to suppose that their action was not
altogether free from the kind of gratitude that inspired the bounty of
the great king.[86]
FOOTNOTES:
[33] _E.g._ Laxton enclosed on petition of Lord Carbery in 1772. Total
area 1200 acres. Enclosure proceedings completed in the Commons in
nineteen days. Also Ashbury, Berks, enclosed on petition of Lord Craven
in 1770. There were contrary petitions. Also Nylands, enclosed in 1790
on petition of the lady of the manor. Also Tilsworth, Beds, enclosed
on petition of Charles Chester, Esq., 1767, and Westcote, Bucks, on
petition of the most noble George, Duke of Marlborough, January 24,
1765. Sometimes the lord of the manor associated the vicar with his
petition: thus Waltham, Croxton and Braunston, covering 5600 acres, in
Leicestershire, were all enclosed in 1766 by the Duke of Rutland and
the local rector or vicar. The relations of Church and State are very
happily illustrated by the language of the petitions, ‘A petition of
the most noble John, Duke of Rutland, and the humble petition’ of the
Rev. ---- Brown or Rastall or Martin.
[34] This Standing Order does not seem to have been applied
universally, for Mr. Bragge on December 1, 1800, made a motion that it
should be extended to the counties where it had not hitherto obtained.
See _Senator_, vol. xxvii., December 1, 1800.
[35] See particulars in Appendix.
[36] _A Six Months’ Tour through the North of England_, 1771, vol. i.
p. 122.
[37] Pp. 21 f.
[38] Cf. Otmoor in next chapter.
[39] See Appendix.
[40] See Appendix.
[41] See _House of Commons Journal_.
[42] Eden, _The State of the Poor_, vol. ii. p. 157.
[43] Eden, writing a few years later, remarks that since the enclosure
‘the property in Holy Island has gotten into fewer hands,’ vol. ii. p.
149.
[44] Report of Select Committee on Most Effectual Means of Facilitating
Enclosure, 1800.
[45] Cf. also Wraisbury in Bucks, _House of Commons Journal_, June 17,
1799, where the petitioners against the Bill claimed that they spoke
on behalf of ‘by much the greatest Part of the Proprietors of the said
Lands and Grounds,’ yet in the enumeration of consents the committee
state that the owners of property assessed at £6, 18s. are hostile out
of a total value of £295, 14s.
[46] _House of Commons Journal_, March 21, 1796.
[47] _House of Commons Journal_, June 10, 1801; cf. also case of
Laleham. See Appendix.
[48] _Ibid._, June 15, 1801.
[49] _Ibid._, May 3, 1809.
[50] _Ibid._, June 29, 1797.
[51] See Appendix A (13).
[52] _A Political Enquiry into the Consequences of enclosing Waste
Lands_, 1785, p. 108.
[53] See Appendix A (12).
[54] House of Commons, May 1, 1845.
[55] Aglionby, House of Commons, June 5, 1844.
[56] Thurlow was Chancellor from 1778 to 1783 (when Fox contrived to
get rid of him) and from 1783 to 1792.
[57] _Parliamentary Register_, House of Lords, March 30, 1781.
[58] Sir George Savile (1726-1784), M.P. for Yorkshire, 1759-1783;
carried the Catholic Relief Bill, which provoked the Gordon Riots, and
presented the great Yorkshire Petition for Economical Reform.
[59] _Annual Register_, 1867, p. 68. For a detailed history of the
Stanwell Enclosure, see Appendix A (10). Unhappily the farmers were
only reprieved; Stanwell was enclosed at the second attempt.
[60] See _Parliamentary Register_, House of Lords, March 30, 1781;
April 6, 1781; June 14, 1781.
[61] John Warren (1730-1800).
[62] John Hinchcliffe (1731-1794), at one time Master of Trinity
College, Cambridge.
[63] _Parliamentary Register_, March 30, 1781.
[64] _Senator_, vol. xxvi., July 2, 1800.
[65] For both speeches see _Parliamentary Register_, May 24, 1802.
[66] _Ibid._, June 14, 1781.
[67] See Cheshunt, Louth, Simpson, and Stanwell in Appendix.
[68] _Six Months’ Tour through the North of England_, 1771, vol. i. p.
122.
[69] See _Annual Register_, 1800, Appendix to Chronicle, p. 87.
[70] _Parliamentary Register_, June 14, 1781.
[71] _Annals of Agriculture_, vol. xxvi. p. 111.
[72] February 1, 1793.
[73] See Chapter iv.
[74] Vol. xxvi. p. 70.
[75] Sinclair’s language shows that this was the general arrangement.
Of course there are exceptions. See _e.g._ Haute Huntre and other cases
in Appendix.
[76] Cf. Billingsley’s _Report on Somerset_, p. 59, where the
arrangements are described as ‘a _little system of patronage_. The
lord of the soil, the rector, and a few of the principal commoners,
monopolize and distribute the appointments.’
[77] _Parliamentary Register_, June 14, 1781.
[78] _General Report on Enclosures_, 1808.
[79] _Six Months’ Tour through the North of England_, vol. i. p. 122.
[80] See Appendix A (6).
[81] _Report on Somerset_, p. 192.
[82] _Parliamentary Register_, January 21, 1772.
[83] _Carlisle MSS._; _Historical MSS. Commission_, pp. 301 ff.
[84] Charles James Fox.
[85] The earlier name of Brooks’s Club.
[86] For the subsequent history of King’s Sedgmoor, see Appendix A
(14).